Apple enabling client-side CSAM scanning on iPhone tomorrow
twitter.com
twitter.com
For context, I deeply hate the abuse of children and I've worked on a contract before that landed 12 human traffickers in custody that were smuggling sex slaves across boarders. I didn't need to know details about the victims in question, but it's understood that they're often teenagers or children.
So my initial reaction when reading this Twitter thread was "let's get these bastards" but on serious reflection I think that impulse is wrong. Unshared data shouldn't be subject to search. Once it's shared, I can make several cases for an automated scan, but a cloud backup of personal media should be kept private. Our control of our own privacy matters. Not for the slippery slope argument or for the false positive argument, but for its own sake. We shouldn't be assuming the worst of people without cause or warrant.
That said, even though I feel this way a not-small-enough part of me will be pleased if it is deployed because I want these people arrested. It's the same way I feel when terrorists get captured even if intelligence services bent or broke the rules. I can be happy at the outcome without being happy at the methods, and I can feel queasy about my own internal, conflicted feelings throughout it all.
That said, law enforcement has a nasty habit of having a rather "binary" worldview. People are either cops, or uncaught criminals. ..and they wonder why they have so much trouble making non-cop friends (DISCLAIMER: I know a number of cops).
With that worldview, it can be quite easy to "blur the line" between child sex traffickers, and parking ticket violators. I remember reading a The Register article, about how anti-terrorism statutes are being abused by local town councils to do things like find zoning violations (for example, pools with no CO).
Misapplied laws can be much worse than letting some criminals go. This could easily become a nightmare, if we cede too much to AI.
And that isn't even talking about totalitarian regimes, run by people of the same ilk as child sex traffickers (only wearing Gucci, and living in palaces).
”Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be.”
-Lyndon B. Johnson
I'm not. I am very unambiguously against this and I think if word gets out Apple could have a real problem.
I would like to think I am against child porn as any well-adjusted adult. That does not mean I wish for all my files to be scanned without my consent or even knowledge for compliance, for submission to who knows where matching to who knows what reporting to, well, who knows.
That's crossing a line. You are now reading my private files, interpreting them, and doing something based on that interpretation. That is surveillance.
I am very not OK with this.
- Yea yeah
- Great. Give me access to every part of your life so i know you're not a terrorist.
This should be reason enough for you to not support the idea.
From day 1, it's matching legal images and phoning home about them. Increasing the scope of scanning is barely a slippery slope, they're already beyond the stated scope of the database.
My point is that we have no way to verify the database wouldn't be abused or mistaken and a lot of that rests on the fact that CSAM is not something people want to have to encounter, ever.
I don't know what the cutoff is, but it doesn't sound like they believe that possession of a single photo in the database is inherently illegal. That doesn't mean this is overall a good idea. It simply weakens your specific argument about occasional false positives.
If Android then implements something similar, they have the option to simply run different software, as Android lets you run whatever you want so long as you sign the wavier.
"You're using Android?! What do you have to hide?" -- Apple ad in 2030, possibly
It's a pandoras box. You wouldn't allow the regular search of your home in real life.
"Think of the children" is how they force changes that would otherwise be unconscionable.
They've done it with encryption and anonymity for years. Now they're doing it with the hardware in your pocket.
We would all be better off without these things happening, and anyone would want less of it to happen.
Since they are only searching for _known_ abusive content, by definition they can only detect data that has been shared, which I think is the important point here.
I have a much simpler rule: Your device should never willingly* betray you.
*With a warrant, police can attempt to plant a bug, but your device should not help them do so.
The vast majority of iPhone users won't consider it a betrayal that they can't send images of child abuse, any more than they consider it a betrayal that it doesn't come jailbroken.
The victims of child abuse depicted in these images may well have considered it a betrayal by Apple that they allowed their privacy to be so flagrantly violated on their devices up until now.
So... all your hashes will be uploaded to the cloud? How do you prevent them from scanning other stuff (memes, leaked documents, trump-fights-cnn-gif,... to profile the users)?
Or will a huge hash database of child porn hashes be downloaded to the phone?
Honestly, i think it's one more abuse of terrorism/child porn to take away privacy of people, and mark all oposing the law as terrorists/pedos.
...also, as in the thread from the original url, making false positives and spreading them around (think 4chan mass e-mailing stuff) might cause a lot of problems too.
... without any technical guarantee or auditability that any of the hashes they're alerting on are actually of child porn.
How much would you bet against law enforcement to abuse their ability to use this, and add hashes to find out who's got anti government memes or police committing murder images on their phones?
And that's just in "there land of the free", how much worst will the abuse of this be in countries who, say, bonesaw journalists to pieces while they are alive?
This will end badly for humanity.
A malware will definitely be created, almost immediately, that will download files that are intentionally made to match CP - either for the purposes of extortion or just watching the world burn.
I'm usually sticking my neck out in defence of more government access to private media than most on HN because of the need to stop CP, but this plan is so naive, and so incredibly irresponsible, that I can't see how anyone with any idea of how easy it would be to manipulate would ever stand behind it.
Even if you do a content aware hash where you break the file into chunks and hash each chunk, you still wouldn’t be able to magically recreate the hash of a CP file without also producing part of the CP.
Seriously, folks, we shouldn't celebrate Apple's death grip over their platform. It's dangerous for all of us. The more of you that use it, the more it creates a sort of "anti-herd immunity" towards totalitarian control.
Apple talks "privacy", but jfc they're nothing of the sort. Apple gives zero shits about your privacy. They're staking more ground against Facebook and Google, trying to take their beachheads. You're just a pawn in the game for long term control.
Apple cares just as much for your privacy as they do your "freedom" to run your own (un-taxed) software or repair your devices (for cheaper).
And after Tim Cook is replaced with a new regime, you'll be powerless to stop the further erosion of your liberties. It'll be too late.
Stop. Using. Apple.
But is there a realistically better alternative? Pinephone with a personally audited Linux distro? A jailbroken Android device with a non-stock firmware that you built yourself? A homebuilt RaspberryPi based device? A paper notepad and a film camera and an out of print street map?
That isn't how I interpret "client-side".
The privacy implications are far more subtle.
It always starts with child porn, and in a few years the offline Notes app will be phoning home if you write speech criticising the government in China.
This technology inevitably leads to the sueveillance, suppression and murder of activists and journalists. It always starts with protecting the kids or terrorism.
Perceptual hashes like what Apple is using are already used in WeChat to detect memes that critique the CCP.
What happens on local end user devices must be off limits. It is unacceptable that Apple is actively implementing machine learning systems that surveil and snitch on local content.
So I want to ask what happens if you have a photo that is falsely identified as one in question and then an automated mechanism flags you and reports you to the FBI without you even knowing. Can they access your phone at that point to investigate? Would they come to your office and ask about it? Would that be enough evidence to request a wiretap or warrant? Would they alert your neighbors? How do you clear your name after that happens?
edits: yes, the hash database is downloaded to the phone and matches are checked on your phone.
Another point is that these photos used to generate the fingerprints are really legal black holes that the public is not allowed to inspect I assume. No one wants to be involved in looking at them, no one wants to be known as someone who looks at them. It could even be legally dangerous requesting to find out what has been put into the image database I assume.
That seems like a realistic attack. Since the hash list is public (has to be for client side scanning), you could likely set your computer to grind out a matching image hash but of some meme which you then distribute.
No, it'll be done on-device.
> How do you prevent them from scanning other stuff (memes, leaked documents, trump-fights-cnn-gif
Nothing. Given that it's only done on their closed-source messaging platform though, nothing is preventing them from reading your messages already.
But yes, it could potentially be used to detect images that the current political party doesn't like.
Because you know in some countries there are materials that local government find more offensive than mere child abuse. And once surveillance tech is deployed it's certainly gonna be used to oppress people.
In Saudi, Bahrain, and Iran there is no minimum age of consent – just a requirement for marriage. In Yemen, the age of consent for women is 9 (but they must be married first). In Macau, East Timor, and UAE, it's 14. [1]
I would allege that in all of those states they would probably find the perceptual hash of government criticism far more important to include on the "evil material" database than anything else.
And you can be sure that there's no way for the PRC, that already runs its own iCloud, to use this. America's favorite company wouldn't allow that.
I'm cynical enough to wonder whether this isn't their actual commercial reason for developing this, with CSAM being a PR fig leaf. Apple is substantially more dependent on China than its major competitors.
First it's iPhone photos, then it's all iCloud files, that spills into Macs using iCloud, then it's client side reporting of local Mac files, and somewhere along all other Apple hardware I've filled my home with have received equivalent updates and are phoning home to verify that I don't have files or whatever data they can see or hear that some unknown authority has decided should be reported.
What is the utopian perspective of this which counterbalances the risks for this to be a path worth taking?
Apple takes care of everything for you, and they have your best interests at heart. You will be safe, secure, private and seamlessly integrated with your beautiful devices, so you can more efficiently consume.
What's not to like about a world where child crime, terrorism, abuse, radical/harmful content and misinformation can be spotted in inception and at the source and effectively quarantined?
In 2021 and 2020 we saw people being arrested for planning/promoting anti lockdown protests. Not for actually participating but for simply posting about it. The scope of what "harmful content" is is infinite. You might agree that police do need to take action against these people but surely you can see how the scope creeped from literal terrorists and pedophiles to edgy facebook mums and how that could move even further to simple criticisms of the government or religion.
It's difficult to say how we draw the line to make sure horrible crimes go punished while still protecting reasonable privacy and freedom. I'm guessing apples justification here is that they are not sending your photos to police but simply checking them against known bad hashes and if you are not a pedophile, there will be no matches and none of your data will have been exposed.
You will make Apple tons of money.
It's only boring until we get another Hitler or equivalent.
Basically victims of rape don't want imagery of their rape freely distributed as pornography. They consider that a violation of their rights.
It's interesting how many users in this thread are instinctively siding with the offenders in this, and not the victims. Presumably because they made it through their own childhoods without having imagery of their own abuse shared online.
I strongly believe that nobody wants to further victimize people by publicly showing images of their abuse.
And I believe very strongly that putting hundreds of millions of people under blanket general suspicion is a dangerous first step.
Imagine if every bank had to search all documents in safe deposit boxes to see if people had committed tax evasion (or stored other illegal things like blood diamonds obtained with child labor). That would be an equivalent in the physical world.
Now add to this, as discussed elsewhere here, that the database in question contains not only BIlder of victims, but also perfectly legal images. This can lead to people "winning" a house search because they have perfectly legal data stored in their cloud.
Furthermore, this means that a single country's understanding of the law is applied to a global user community. From a purely legal point of view, this is an interesting problem.
And yes: I would like to see effective measures to make the dissemination of such material more difficult. At the same time, however, I see it as difficult to use a tool for this purpose that is not subject to any control by the rule of law and cannot be checked if the worst comes to the worst.
That is infantile. Painting people advocating privacy as siding with offenders is highly insulting.
What would be the result of 'curl'ing back a few random hashes as positives from the database? Do I expect to be handcuffed and searched until it's sorted out? What if my app decides to do this to users? A malicious CSRF request even?
(I'll wager) The majority of these calls will be false positives. Now a load of resources get deployed to keep an eye on the device's owner, wasting staff time and compute, wasting (tax funded) government budget that could have gone towards proper investigation.
Another thought - notice that they say "if too many appear". This may mean that the hashes don't store many bits of information (and would not be reversible) and that false positives are likely - ie, one image is not enough to decide you have a bad actor - you need more.
But at Apple's scale, statistically, some law-abiding users would likely get snagged with totally innocent images.
Just a bad idea all around.
Creating collisions could be though, eg. brute forcing a normal picture by modifying random pixels by a bit into matching an illegal content’s hash is a possibility.
1) You willingly delegated the decision of what code is allowed to run on your devices to the manufacturer (2009). Smart voices warned you of today's present even then.
2) You willingly got yourself irrevocably vendor-locked by participating in their closed social networks, so that it's almost impossible to leave (2006).
3) You willingly switched over essentially all human communication to said social networks, despite the obvious warning signs. (2006-2021)
4) Finally you showed no resistance to these private companies when they started deciding what content should be allowed or banned, even when it got purely political (2020).
Now they're getting more brazen. And why shouldn't they? You'll obey.
Making holier than thou comments about everyone else being sheep isn't helpful or thought provoking. Offer an alternative if it is a bad one (looking at you Mastodon). So here's mine: we need to change the power of digital advertising. Most of the most rent seeking companies generate revenue primarily selling ads to get more people to buy more crap. I want a VAT on all revenue passing through the digital advertising pipeline. My hope is that if these things are less profitable, it will reduce the over-sized impact these companies (social, infotainment [there is no news anymore], search, etc.) have on our economy and life. People are addicted to to fomo and outrage (faux?), I don't that that will ever change but we can try to make it less profitable.
It’s not clear that governments would give the open social networks an easier ride either. It could be argued that distributed FOSS developers are easier to pressurise into adding back doors, unless we officially make EFF our HR/Legal department.
The other problem is workers have a right to be paid. The alternatives are FOSS and/or distributed social media. Who in good conscience would ask a tech worker to give away their labour for free, in the name of everyone else’s freedom?
In a world of $4k rent, who amongst us will do UX, frontend, backend, DevOps, UO, and Security for 7 billion people, for anything but the top market rate?
The real alternative is to attack the actual problem: state overreach. Don’t attack people for using SnapChat — get them to upend the government’s subservience to intrusive law enforcement.
Now any person who owns an Android is a potential predator. Also, if you are trying to jailbreak your iPhone, you are a potential predator.
The only thing that's changed here is that there is more encryption around, and so legal guidelines are being written to facilitate this, which has been happening for a long, long time.
(I don't disagree with your overall point, and child porn is definitely the thin edge of the wedge, but this isn't new and presumably shouldn't be too surprising for any current/former megacorp as they all have systems like this).
> 1) You willingly delegated the decision of what code is allowed to run on your devices to the manufacturer (2009). Smart voices warned you of today's present even then.
99% of the population will delegate the decision of what code is allowed to run to someone, be it the manufacturer, the government, some guy on the Internet or whatever. For that 99% of the population, by the way, it's actually more beneficial to have restrictions on what software can be installed to avoid malware.
> 2) You willingly got yourself irrevocably vendor-locked by participating in their closed social networks, so that it's almost impossible to leave (2006).
"Impossible to leave" is not a matter of closed or open, but it's a matter of social networks in general. You could make Facebook free software and its problems wouldn't disappear.
Not to mention that, again, 99% of people will get vendor-locked because in the end nobody wants to run their own instance of a federated social network.
> You willingly switched over essentially all human communication to said social networks, despite the obvious warning signs. (2006-2021)
Yes, it's been years since I talked someone face to face or on the phone and I cannot send letters anymore.
> 4) Finally you showed no resistance to these private companies when they started deciding what content should be allowed or banned, even when it got purely political (2020).
No resistance? I mean, it's been quite a lot of discussion and pushback on social networks for their decisions on content. Things move slow, but "no resistance" is quite the understatement.
> Now they're getting more brazen. And why shouldn't they? You'll obey.
Is this Mr. Robot talking now?
But now more seriously, in December the European Electronic Communications Code comes into effect, and while it's true that there's a temporary derogation that allows these CSAM scanners, there's quite a big debate around it and things will change.
The main problem with privacy and computer control is a collective one that must be solved through laws. Thinking that individual action and free software will solve it is completely utopic. A majority of the people will delegate control over their computing devices to another entity because most people don't have both knowledge and time to do it, and that entity will always have the option to go rogue. And, unfortunately, regulation takes time.
Anyways, one should wonder why, after all these years of these kinds of smug messages, we're in this situation. Maybe the solutions and the way of communicating the problems is wrong, you know.
Truth is even if our tools evolve, our chains evolve faster.
Instead, we as a collective decided to offload these tasks to the government and make broad decisions through voting. This allows us to focus on other things (at work, with our actual job, at home, you can focus with what matters for you, whatever that might be).
For instance, I tried to avoid Facebook for a while and it was working well, I just missed few acquaintances but could keep in touch with the people who matter for me. Then suddenly they acquired Whatsapp. What am I to do? Ask my grandmother and everyone in between to switch to Telegram? Instead, I'm quite happy as a European about the GDPR and how the EU is regulating companies in these regards. It's definitely not yet there, but IMHO we are going in the right direction.
Then they came for the Socialists. And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews. And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me. And there was no one left To speak out for me
(2) and (3) are bad, but a tangential bad to this: it’s no good having an untainted chat layer if it’s running on an imperfect — anywhere from hostile to merely lowest-bidder solution — OS. (And most of the problems we find in software have been closer to the later than the former).
(4) for all their problems, the American ones held off doing that until there was an attempted coup, having previously resisted blocking Trump despite him repeatedly and demonstrably violating their terms.
It's perfectly legal elsewhere (if a bit weird) to have some Simpsons/whatever mash-up of sexualised images, but if I flew on a plane to the land down under, would I then be flagged?
edit: If this is scanning stuff on your phone automatically, and you have whatsapp or whatever messenger set to save media automatically, then mass texting an image that is considered 'normal' in the sender country, but 'bad' in the recipients, you could get a lot of people flagged just by sending a message.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/simpsons-po...
And you know what? Most people deserve to be locked in and subject to automatic surveillance. They will wake up when their phone creates a China-Style social score automatically, but then it will be far too late. It's a shame for those people that fought this development for years, though. But the "I have nothing to hide" crowd deserves to wake up in a world of cyber fascism.
When you mention that set of population as deserving the consequences, it does not seem too far to me from "People who want trains instead of cars deserve trains". Is this relevant? The big problem is, people buy controversial services, hence finance them and endorse them, hence strengthen them, and in some cases these services make the acceptable ones extinct: the big problem is that people do not refuse what is not sensible, and sensible people have to pay.
Already here where I live, I cannot get essential services¹ because that practice made them extinct!!!
¹(exactly: public administration, tick; banking, very big tick; medicine, not yet. And you did not mention ___the cars___, and more...)
Other note: you wrote
> nearly no one owns their phone
and some of us are stuck with more reliable older devices, which soon may need some kind of replacement. If you know the exceptions to the untrustable devices, kindly share brand/model/OS/tweak.
Apple? How? Your other option is Android, who do you choose when they start to do it?
Or when governments decide to mandate that ALL phones need to legally have "scanning all the files on it and report them back to the police database" mechanisms?
The EU? Particularly how? An organization that has been deliberately structured to supersede the legitimacy of nation states and export it's power to all of it's members at the whim -- sometimes it seems -- of some aging out of touch bureaucrats.
I'm not even a #brexiter, btw.
Should Scotland become an independent nation? There was a public debate and people had opinions -- and there were mechanisms in place to act on and make a change, as an example.
There has been no public debate on this in a national sense (anywhere), and also no mechanisms by which people could decide to change it. I'm not sure people deserve it.
which one?
I can’t say I’m surprised they are implementing this (if true), under the radar. I can’t imagine a correct way or platform for Apple to share this rollout publicly. I’m sure nothing will come of this, press will ignore the story, and we all go back to our iPhones
But Apple iCloud for ex doesn't intrude on your privacy any more or less than Google Photos.
Edit: Actually, this won't even require an exploit if they also scan media for people who have enabled "iMessage in iCloud".
Just send someone an image in the DB (or an image that's been engineered to generate a false positive) and wait for them to get raided.
Authoritarian regimes love this.
Presumably the same could apply to your phone. Most messengers save images automatically. I presume the images are immediately scanned against hashes once saved. And the report is immediately made if it passes the reported threshold. There’s no defence against this. Your phone number is basically public information and probably in a database somewhere. You have no protection here from abuse, if you’re a normal citizen. I bet most people don’t even turn the auto save setting off on WhatsApp.
> Regardless of what Apple’s long term plans are, they’ve sent a very clear signal. In their (very influential) opinion, it is safe to build systems that scan users’ phones for prohibited content.
> That’s the message they’re sending to governments, competing services, China, you.
Like gay porn, 'save Khashoggi' meme, or a photo from documentary about missing Uighurs.
It's hard to imagine how this could be misused, right?
I switched to the Apple ecosystem 2 years ago and have been extremely happy.
I couldn't see a single reason to switch back.
Today that reason came. What goes on on my phone is my business.
I guess fairphone next.
Again, I think have nothing to hide now so I can sat this loud and clear now. Given what recent elections have shown us we cannot know if I have something to hide in a few years (political, religious? Something else? Not that I plan to change but things have already changed extremely much since I was a kid 30 years ago.)
At the end of the day laws are relative so to say. The thought behind such a system is noble indeed, but as we've seen, anything any government gets their hands on, they will abuse it. Classic example being PRISM et al. In theory it's great to be able to catch the bad guys, but it was clearly abused. This is from countries that are meant to be free, forward thinking etc, not any authoritarian regimes.
People in this thread are asking what Saudi Arabia, China etc will do with such power that Apple is adding, you bet your ass that they'll use it for their own gain.
I want to believe in such systems for the good. I want child abusers caught. But a system that equally can be abused by the wrong people (and I guarantee you that will be western countries too) ain't it.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-data-china-censors-app...
And at that point the well meaning privacy advocate who worked hard to get some nice policies to protect users is booted off the project because you can hardly tell the shareholders and investors who own the company that you're going to ignore $billions in revenue or let your rival get ahead because of some irrelevant political movement on the other side of the world.
It's happened plenty of times before and it'll happen again.
Why? Is it simply because it fits their world view?
I’m not sure if it’s a rumor or not but there was a thread on HN the other day about Facebook exploring homomorphic encryption for running ads on WhatsApp and I wonder if wires got crossed?
Scanning on phones is a step toward end to end encryption for photos probably. Or scanning not uploaded photos. Or both.
A lot of people love not having options and having these decisions made for them.
I would never want a device like that or with something that scans my device, but I think the vast majority of their customers if they even hear about it will think "I trust apple, they know what's best, it wont affect me"
Im ok with apple doing it because i think most apple users will be ok with it. I would not be ok with it if all Android devices started doing it though.
It’s less “I trust Apple” and more “if I really cared, I’d have bought from another designer”.
This does looks good on paper - caring for customers and their security, peace of mind but tomorrow it might be a total vendor-lock with no ways of installing any other software than one approved by the corporate entities.
[1] - https://www.ghacks.net/2021/08/03/windows-10-blocks-potentia...
My parents took lots of photos of me as a baby/small child. Say lying naked on a blanket or a naked 2yr old me in a kiddie pool in the summer in our backyard. Those are private photos and because it was the 1970s those were just taken with a normal non-digital camera. They were OBVIOUSLY never shared with others, especially outside immediate family.
Transform that into the 2020s and today these type of pictures would be taken with your iPhone. Would they now be classified as child pornography even though they weren't meant to be shared with anyone nor were they ever shared with anyone? Just your typical proud parent photo of your toddler.
Sounds a bit like a slippery slope, but maybe I am misunderstanding the gravity here. I'm specifically highlighting private "consumption" (parent taking picture of their child who happens to be naked as 1yr olds tend to be sometimes) vs "distribution" (parent or even a nefarious actor taking picture of a child and sharing it with third parties). I 100% want to eliminate child pornography. No discussion. But how do we prevent "false positives" with this?
If that sounds absurd - most laws are like that. For better or worse, there's a human who interprets the law, not a computer. It's unfortunate Apple is choosing to elect a computer as the judge here, for exactly concerns like yours.
Unless someone has been distributing photos of your kids as child porn (which would probably be good to know) it's unlikely any of your photos will match the hashes of the photos in that database.
I'm not sure that's how it works, but that's what I've gathered from the other comments on this post.
Also, this functionality isn't something they should be able to implement without telling their end users.
It is also problematic because it will just make the cyber criminals more technical aware of what counter measures they must take to protect their illegal data.
The consequence is very bad for the regular consumer: the cyber criminal will be able to hide, and the government has the possibility to scan your files. End consumer lose, again.
Contrast this with my desktop where, in the press of a few buttons, I am presented with the source code for the CPU frequency scaling code.
Bring on the Linux phones.
Ontop of this, it gives apple far too much power. What happens when someone they don't like owns an iphone? They can pull an FBI and put the content onto the device, and having it then "automatically detected".
Apple: Say no more, here they are. Hope you won't imprison all of them, as that would decrease our services revenue substantially, lol.
Also Apple: Privacy is a human right, buy more iphones.
Treat your phones as an enemy. Use real computers with VPN and software like Little Snitch when online. Use cameras for photography and video.
The benefits of this approach are immense. I have long attention span. I don't have fear of missing out.
If governments wan't the future to be painted by tracing and surveillance mediated towards people trough big tech - lets make it mandatory by law. And since big tech will reap benefits from the big data they must provide phones for free. :)
I'm assuming your "real computer" is a mac (since little snitch is mac only). What makes you think apple won't do the same for macos? Also, while you have greater control with a "real computer", you also have less privacy from the apps themselves, since they're unsandboxed and have full access to your system.
Dude, you carry it around with you, with its radio enabled. You're just fooling yourself.
So, it's rather hard to avoid banking apps.
Also, the PSD2 directive implements the duty of providing API infrastructure for third-parties. [1]
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/intro/mip-online/2018/html/18...
PhotoDNA and systems like it are really interesting, but it seems like clientside scanning is a dangerous decision, not just from the privacy perspective. It seems like giving a CSAM detector and hashes to people is a really risky idea, even if it’s perfect and it does what it says it does without violating privacy.
If the algorithm and the blocklists leaked, then not only it would be possible to develop tools that reliably modify CSAM to avoid detection, but also generate new innocent-looking images that are caught by the filter. That could be used to overwhelm law enforcement with false positives and also weaponized for SWAT-ing.
https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
- terrorism - child pornography
Try to protest it and you will be prompted with a nice "do you have anything to hide?" question by the masses.
The advertised intention of these tools could not be farther from the truth and people happily fills their pockets at each new launch.
- (Check) fragile
- (Check) best monopoly app store
- (Check) high price
- (Check) phones the police in case of a sha collision
Personally I somehow doubt that MS/Google weren't scanning private content (aka not shared) for this type of material. But can't have transparency with these behemoths.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2021/07/07/eu-adopts-temporary-rule...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/7/5977827/microsoft-tips-off...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/5/5970141/how-google-scans-y...
Another side note is about near future when someone comes up with synthetic CP images, will they also be criminalised?
You can read about this directly from a victim via this NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...
1) Does this work only on iPhones or will it be iPads, as well?
2) Is this part of a system software update? I wonder if that will show up in the notes and how it would be spun. "In order to better protect our users ..."
3) If it is part of the system software update, will they be trying to make it run on older iDevices?
4) Is it just photos in your photo bin, iCloud, or does it start grabbing at network drives it attaches to? I could see the latter being prone to blowing up in their proverbial faces.
The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse ride again!
A court order should be mandatory, not this blanket scanning.
Thankfully, there is the option to steer clear of Apple devices.
Has apple published its training data somewhere?
This might be naive, but I would guess that the best way to fight this kind of thing is to let people know more of the case details. People would protect themselves, find the crimes, and stop unwittingly supporting them. For instance, if it can be shown that cryptocurrency or encrypted messengers are used to a significant extent, the community will either find a technical solution, or stop using it.
Back to an Android phone, once I confirm this story is true.
* A car that automatically pulls over when a police cruiser attempts to intercept you
* A front door that unlocks when a cop knocks
* A camera that uses AI to detect and prevent the photography of minors, police, and critical infrastructure
* A Smart TV that counts the number of people in your living room to ensure you aren't performing an unauthorized public broadcast of copyrighted content
Surely, at least one of those sounds ridiculous to you. As well-intentioned as this scanning may be, it violates a core principle of privacy and human autonomy. Your own device should not betray you. As technologists, just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.
The UK and Israel allowed cops to monitor cell phone locations to crack down on unlawful gatherings in private homes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/17/israel-to-trac...
The problem with allowing this is that you’re paving the way for future tyrants to use it against us.
The technology is there, now we only need the motivation. If politicians decides that they want it now, they can simply orchestrate a media campaign and have it. The next time an "outrageous" act of crime is conducted, they can make sure that it stays at the media attention and be portrayed as "If we don't act now very bed things will happen", then slide in their solution.
* Cars can automatically pull over by installing a cheap cut fuel cut switch that can be activated by short range radio. In many places people are used to add devices for toll collection anyway. People are also used to pay for regulatory inspections on their vehicles.
* For the old cars, simply connect an NFC reader that unlocks the central lock system of a car by a master key. For the new cars, simply make manufacturers add a police master key.
* Commercial drones are already stopping their users from flying over forbidden areas, simply extend that to smartphones. Smartphones have enough power and sensors to identify forbidden locations and persons. Add NFC kill switch, meaning the police can send a signal to lock down cameras.
* There were reports of Smart TVs that record all the time, simply mandate it to all manufacturers and enforce automated inspection of the recordings.
Apple devices already betray their "owners", and they've been doing it for a long time.
You can't repair them.
You can't run your own software.
You can't use a better, more compliant web browser.
Businesses have to pay a 30% tax.
Businesses are forced to use login with Apple and forfeit a customer relationship.
Businesses have to dance to appease Apple. Their software gets banned, randomly flagged, or unapproved for deployment, sometimes completely on a whim.
Soon, more iDevices and Apple Pay will lead to further entrenchment. Just like in the movie Demolition Man, everything will eventually be Apple. Your car, your movies, your music, your elected officials.
People WILL be a fan of all of this if the alternative is lots of robbery / car theft etc etc.
We see this globally. If the state is not offering security now - they will accept incredible craziness for security.
One note - in most cases folks trust Apple MORE than they would for example the Trump administration. Food for thought.
If you're interested I suggest you also have a look at photo DNA[0]
Today its csam. Tomorrow "misleading information". etc.
For tech stuff I do need Id like to pick dedicated "appliance like" tools, but each of those requires some research.
It lets "Apple Scan"? So Apple is going to proactively scanning your photos using a tool then install?
So many questions about this. It doesn't add up.
Instead of specifically targeting suspects, everyone is surveyed by default. Welcome to a world of mass surveillance.
As I understand it: it's a tool (that sends a command of some sort) that compels an iphone to perform the hashing match operation, and output results. Is that correct? Does it notify the user?
If I had to build it within apple's privacy framework, that'd probably be my approach: remote command causes sepos unlock of photos library (even running the job on sepos?) to do photo scanning. sepos returns hashes that match
So which Linux desktop sucks the least at the moment?
Contraband detected
If they are only concerned with iCloud accounts then... why not scan in the cloud? Can anyone explain to me why client-side scanning is actually needed here? As far as I'm aware, Apple only E2E encrypts iMessages, not iCloud photos or backups.
US politicians (to say nothing of countries with less individual freedoms) already openly pressure tech companies to censor specific content. And tech companies will do so even to the point of blocking direct, private, 1-1 messages sharing specific news. In that light, Apple's crossing a line to client-side scanning seems deeply concerning.
I don't see how keeping this as narrowly-targeted as it's being advertised would ever be possible or even intended.
I can see law enforcement showing up at my door one day with a search warrant demanding to have a look around, and I would have no idea why they’re there, but they’ll want to look through all my personal belongings.
Worse yet, I might come home from work one day, see my windows broken, see my place has been ransacked and my computers are missing. I would call the police to report a burglary only to hear than that I’m under investigation and they need me to give them the key to decrypt my hard drives.
While this argument can and have indeed happened in other instances, this is akin to saying that we should not give anyone any powers to do anything because it is a slippery slope that they can use it to do bad things.
What then sets out the difference between what a slippery slope and a non-slippery one is? Checks and balances and the history of USA have shown that this is indeed what can reign in the worst instincts of any single entity. History of course have also shown when these failed and these should serve not as a reason to reject the idea of checks and balances but as acknowledging it's imperfection and think of ways to mitigate it.
Two instances: 1) Post 9/11 Patriot Law 2) McCarthy era: https://www.e-ir.info/2011/11/03/the-extraordinary-injustice...
As far as I know, this kind of scanning is not legally mandated. So, either they think that this will truly make the world a better place and are doing it out of some sense of moral responsibility, or they've been pressured into it as part of a sweetheart deal on E2E ("we won't push for crypto backdoors if you'll just scan your users' phones for us"). Either way it doesn't thrill me as a customer that my device is wasting CPU cycles and battery life under the presumption that I might possess data my current jurisdiction deems illegal.
For all the acclaim privacy-forward measures like GDPR get here, I'm surprised there isn't more outright repudiation of this frankly Orwellian situation.
https://fightthenewdrug.org/apple-fights-child-porn-by-scann...
On another note—OSes may only be starting to do this, but that same cynicism still leads me to presume that arbitrary closed-source third-party apps — or even closed-source binary distributions of open-source apps (e.g. the App Store versions of FOSS software) — could have been quietly scanning the files people are passing them for CSAM for years now, without telling users about it. It always seemed to me like the kind of thing it'd make sense to quietly slip into a media player like VLC.
The indian government has recently introduced new laws that give them power to dictate terms over many online platforms and broaden their surveillance powers over online social media and messenger platforms. One of the laws dealing with messenger platforms requires the platform to track shared content, especially "origin of content" (first originator) of any content that is shared through their network. (Facebook / WhatsApp has already gone to the court to challenge this, as it claims that they would need to break end-to-end encryption for this and it thus violates indian privacy laws).
Apple's iMessage platform has more than 25 million users, and thus should come under the ambit of this law. But strangely, the indian government seems to have given them an "exception" .... and now we know why.
I worry about the method itself: will a simplest of firewalls be very effective against this? The one that forbids any communication except with few hosts, like a pair of them?
>Hashes using a new and proprietary neural hashing algorithm Apple has developed, and gotten NCMEC to agree to use.
>We don’t know much about this algorithm. What if someone can make collisions?
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/14230792585163448...
Oh boy..
I suppose that it's a bit like when you do a reverse image search on your favourite search engine. When you upload an image, the engine will try and find images that the ML thinks look the same, even if the bits and bytes that make up the file are different. From what I can see, the similarity detection will be much more specific so as to not generate false positives. As you theorise though, it might be possible to modify images to evade detection if the hash's match specificity is high enough.
All bearing in mind that the pictorial hash also is supposedly designed to be a one-way function to ensure that those who know file hashes don't know what the original contents of the file are.
Privacy is about the only thing keeping innocent people free in today's world.
iOS downloads CSAM scanning code from Apple and runs it locally—hence, client-side tool.
All?
They have to download the hashes in order to compare them, I wonder if a pihole could help here?
Can Samsung phones that are de-googled work ? I am specifically interested in a new phone that Samsung launches, can it be degoogled ?
CSAM? According to Google that's Confocal Scanning Acoustic Microscopy. Or something.
And what with the tweeters? I think my laptop just gave me thighburns from the CPU bloat that clicking on that link caused. Eight seconds to render the page? Why do folks still use this twerker website?
Rather than complain about it, I am interested in what alternative solutions exist, or how concerns regarding privacy and abuse of this system could be mitigated.
Sacrificing the privacy of the many to help catch a relatively small amount of (admittedly some of the worst possible) criminals, while simultaneously enabling yet more effective surveillance and oppression by those inclined governments (of which there are plenty) is a pretty terrible idea.
Eliminating the 4th amendment or mandating clear walls sure would make the cops' job easier. But no one thinks that's even a remotely good idea.
Yet.
Remember SOPA that the internet killed?
stop trading freedom for security.